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I've been using Corel Draw and Corel PhotoPaint for more than 5 years now. At work, we recently acquired Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (on the evil Mac computers). I'm having a horrible time adjusting. It seems that my Corel will do ten times more than Adobe and it's ten times easier to do. Perhaps I'm just not well enough acquainted with Adobe yet. I've heard nothing but glowing reviews from other friends--who've never been able to compare it to Corel. Is there anyone else out there with an opinion about this? Adobe's price tag is so much higher, I had thought it would be superior. If so, could someone recommend a good site or book about Photoshop besides the "wonderful" manual? Thanks.

Oh, and does anyone with professional experience have an opinion about Paint Shop Pro?

I never really got the hang of CorelDraw and have never used CorelPaint. Feature for Feature I think Paint Shop Pro is comparable to CorelPaint. Photoshop offers a lot more but the interface is harder to get used to. Since I don't do too much graphics work besides buttons and webgraphics I use PaintShop Pro. I can't justify the $800 price tag of Photoshop but $69 dollars was easier to swallow. I personally like Paintshop Pro. It does what I want it to do and I can figure out how to do it. I don't have graphic arts experience except for one class in High School 12 years ago so my skills are a little lacking but I just make things look good to my eye and hope for the best.

Paint Shop Pro 6 looks like it's catching up on PhotoShop, and still much cheaper. At the rate that Jasc is enhancing their program, I think they'll catch up pretty soon. Also, I found the learning curve of PhotoShop is steep, so it might take you a while to master it.

Another program to consider is ImageReady, it's a watered-down version of Photoshop specifically for web graphics. I don't recommend it though, since PSP is about the same price and better.

I've used many graphic's packages and Photoshop and Illustrator are the best by far. Once you learn the ins and outs of the program it's amazing how much you can accomplish.. And now that Image Ready is incorporated into Photoshop you can do image slicing and rollover effects easily.

My money is on Paintshop Pro. Its cheap, yet just as powerful as Adobe and Corel. I also use Corel and Adobe, and all these titles have their pros and cons. For one, Adobe is excellent for Editing, but it has some seriosu shortcomings with actual image creations. Corel Excels at this area.

Try all of them, and make up your mind, then. You'll likely find that you prefer using two or three different image editors (counting those great little utils like Irfanview as well), to do the job.

I am a Mac user, and my favorite is "Graphic Converter 3.6." The thing is great for me because you can do almost anything with it, and save it to any format you can imagine. I use it for every graphic I make for the web because you can alter the compresion ratio, make animated gif's from any image format. It has color resolution control, whether you want your JPG's progressive or not. Also has gamma correction, all dithering styles, and just so many more features than to be able to list. You might see if there is a PC version, but I don't think there is. The good news is that it is shareware for only $25.This is what i use for editting my images, but not creating them. For creating them from scratch, PS 5.5 is the best.

Oh, and by the way, gamoses, graphics on a PC just doesn't cut it. Ask Pixar, Disney, or any other major computer graphics company. Jeez, Wintel people and Intel Idiots just get on my nerves sometimes.

Pixar and Disney don't use Macintoshes either. Pixar movies are created in a network of 144 SGI machines sharing resources.

Also Adobe, which used to create software for the Macintosh and had no Windows versions, ported all their software to Windows about 5 years ago. Now Adobe create their new versions for Windows and then ports them to the Macintosh Platform.

In the 1980's, Macintoshes had better graphics than Intel/Microsoft driven machines. This held true until about 1994, when the PC started catching up. Now there is no difference between the two platforms. I challenge you to get a Wintel machine and a Macintosh, hook them up to Identical Monitors, load the same graphic on both and tell the difference.

Macintosh is a good platform. Wintel is a good platform. Neither is perfect and one is no better than the other.

Oh and the best image editors are Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro hands down. I just wish I had the free hours to learn Photoshop properly.

Nope wrong buddy, they use the Mac's to create their stuff, they use the bank of SGI's to do all the rendering work. As far as the graphics go, I agree Photoshop is the best, but for manipulating images and you want cheep, GraphicConverter is the way to go. Then Adobe just did that because they could sell more software because more people have PCs, and the only reason behind that is Apple is to stupid to open up their market. Then you mentioned graphic display, yeah no difference on same set up, but as far as rendering goes Macs can't be beat for speed. A Mac is the fastest consumer computer on the market unless you do have a 20 thousand dollar comercial Sun or SGI. I know, I used to be a PC user until I woke up. Yeah, Windows or MacOS doesn't matter, I use both on my Mac, both just as powerful, and both have their bugs (more with Windows), but I just like the ease of use on the MacOS, a lot more user friendly to me.

When I started using Photoshop 4.0, I was totally baffled. I had a horrible time trying to do anything decent. I visited numerous websites, but I didn't understand all of the talk about layers, channels, etc.

One day while looking around my local bookstore I stumbled across an excellent beginner's guide for Photoshop 4. It's a Visual Quickstart Guide called "Photoshop 4 for Windows". The authors are Elaine Weinmann and Peter Lourekas. It was published by Peachpit Press and the ISBN is 0-201-68842-5. Through the use of step-by-step instructions and numerous pictures, I easily learned the basics of Photoshop.

I then decided to give Photoshop 5.5 a try - I was very impressed. There have been several small but significant changes. The big one being the ability to save for the web. This graphic optimizer can compress huge images into high quality compact sizes.

Personally I have never used Illustrator. It's used for fonts etc correct? Should I give it a try?

As for the argument about PSP and PS. I've tried using PSP and I got frustrated because the interface doesn't make sense. Just my opinion.

I've heard many people heralding the greatness of Macromedia Fireworks. What does everyone else think?

Im using PShop 5.5 with Image Ready 2.
(Also Fireworks 3, imageStyler1, and ect.)
But i havent used Corel Draw or any other photo progr. (I've tried Microsoft photo Draw 2000 for 30 day, but I cant understand all of thouse options in PD2000, maybe its takes more time...).
Someone wrote that PSP 5.5 is better then Fireworks, It's Different(!).
I would love to try/buy Corel Draw 8 or something like this, but untill Ill get it, im happy with Photoshop/imageready collection. (and you can get lots of free plugins for it too...)
good luck

just wanted to say that I have used a ton of diffrent graphic programs but I always eam to go back to PSP!! I love it and I know how to use it!! it is very user friendly and you can do a lot of things with it!! I have used Adobe Photoshop and I thought it was pretty kool but hard to learn how to use!1 But I know with Adobe you can make some kick **** graphiccs if you know how to use it and you have the right filters!! I'm always looking and dling new graphics programs to try out and when I find the perfect one that will be sweet!! but for now I use Paint Shop Pro 6.0!!!

You'd laugh if I told you what image editing programs I use, but it's not the program that makes the design, it's the talent of the designer. Anyone can learn a program, but not everyone has art/layout telent, experience or an eye for design.

I too have used CorelDraw and Paint for several years. For vector drawing and run of the mill dtp jobs CorelDraw is the best. Paint has been hit or miss for me, but then I am using the 7.0 version.

I used various image programs last year auditioning one for an upgrade. PhotoShop gets all the acclaim, but I wasn't the least impressed with Adobe's PhotoDeluxe interface (Ulead's PhotoImpact had twice as much functionality and ease of use). I beta tested PSP 6 last year and adored it. It's an awesomely powerful little program and comes with a handy animation shop better than all I tried.

My vote was to pass on PhotoShop, retire Corel to vector dtp work and buy PSP for my web graphics. I can always work fixes around the missing add-ons from PhotoShop. As someone aptly said, it's not the program but the designer that makes good graphics.

I won't argue one way or the other, I'll just make my comments and, as they say on the talk shows, "hang up and listen".

I started my first full time paid web job in September. Problem is, I'm the ENTIRETY of the "IT Department"... aka I'm the only person there that knows how to do anything more than surf the web and write a letter.

So, I don't have a lot of time to mess around with graphics. I started our with MS PhotoDraw. Shallow learning curve, works with layers, nice interface. Unfortunately, it doesn't do too hot exporting images with text out to JPG and GIF formats.

So now I have tried PSP 6 and Adobe. I gave up on PSP for the lack of an understandable interface. Adobe does have a steep learning curve, but I LOVE the fact that it has layer capability. When I'm designing a graphic, this means I can get everything in on the picture on separate layers and play with it from there. Oh, and it renders text beautifully.

This topic is as big a can of worms as asking "Which distro of Linux is the best" in a room of Linux users. Unless they're all clones, you're going to get different answers all the way around! If I had to assign percentages, I'd say it's 50% package, 25% learning time capability and 25% determination!

On Corel: my wife uses Corel Draw 9 to play with. She's tried converting some of the stuff for use on the web. She wouldn't let me help, but she didin't easilly find anything to help her shrink file sizes, and ended up with some of her pages having a load time in excess of 3 minutes @56k!

I have t side with the people on the Adobe side of the fence. AI and PS are by far the best programs out there for creating your images with. Fireworks is good but i tend to use it for shrinking images down to a decent size and not for anything else.